It has been said that nothing shakes someone’s belief in a higher power more than a personal tragedy, but researchers from UCLA and the University of York have found something which may have close to the same effect–transcranial magnetic brain stimulation.
York psychologist Dr. Keise Izuma and his colleagues conducted an unusual experiment that temporarily halts functions in specific regions of the brain by directing magnetic energy into the posterior medial front cortex–a part of the brain located near the surface of the forehead which has been linked to detecting problems and triggering the appropriate response.
Half of the subjects received a low-level procedure that did not affect their brains, while the other half received enough energy to effectively shut-off the target area. Next, the participants were asked a series of questions about death, their religious viewpoints, and how they felt about immigrants.
As the researchers reported recently in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, those men and women who had activity in their posterior medial front cortex temporarily shut down reported a 32.8 percent reduced belief in God, angels, or heaven. In addition, their feelings towards an immigrant who criticized their country were 28.5 percent more positive.
Switching off brain’s threat-response center made people less negative
“People often turn to ideology when they are confronted by problems,” Dr. Izuma said in a statement. “We wanted to find out whether a brain region that is linked with solving concrete problems, like deciding how to move one’s body to overcome an obstacle, is also involved in solving abstract problems addressed by ideology.”
He said that they wanted to investigate the basis of ideology in the brain, so they focused on the issues of theology and nationalism. They chose to focus on death because previous studies have shown that people turn to religion for comfort when faced with mortality. Switching off activity in the posterior medial frontal cortex, however, made people were less likely to do so.
All subjects were pre-screened to ensure that they were religious prior to the experiments, and each of them were asked to respond to both the negative and positive emotional aspects of both religion and nationalism, the authors said. The experiments also found that magnetic stimulation had a greater affect on people reacting to an essay critical of the US than one praising it.
“We think that hearing criticisms of your group’s values, perhaps especially from a person you perceive as an outsider, is processed as an ideological sort of threat,” Dr. Izuma said.
“One way to respond to such threats is to ‘double down’ on your group values, increasing your investment in them, and reacting more negatively to the critic,” he added. “When we disrupted the brain region that usually helps detect and respond to threats, we saw a less negative, less ideologically motivated reaction to the critical author and his opinions.”
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Feature Image: Thinkstock
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